Adrian Johns

On his book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

Cover Interview of May 09, 2010

Lastly

I hope that the book will encourage protagonists in today’s intellectual-property debates to think more deeply and broadly than they usually do about what is at stake and how we might move forward.

Often very passionate, those debates take place on grounds of policy and law. That makes sense, of course. But it also means that present intellectual property debates leave untouched what are important, perhaps even essential, constituents of the issues at hand. That is, IP in practice is a matter of custom and convention as much as it is of law per se.

If we neglect that fact, our responses to what everyone agrees to be a crisis in the field are likely to be deficient, and quite possibly even damaging.

The upholders of ever-stronger IP protections in particular tend to make this mistake. Their arguments about the practical effects of such protections rest largely on political-economic theories and models.

We need profound engagement with how IP operates in practice. And a necessary part of that engagement must be an appreciation of how the nature and effects of intellectual property have changed over time. That is, the intellectual property wars need some historical insight if they are not to be waged interminably.

Piracy makes that argument. And it further shows that an historical understanding can suggest why our current disputes are so intractable.

By identifying the emergence of an “intellectual property defense industry” the book calls attention to a social and economic phenomenon that has gone largely unrecognized, but which in fact lies at the heart of the problem.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011